When women are centred, balance is restored
At least that's the ambition among the activists, growers and land managers tied to rematriation projects.
I have in mind a commons. It exists in a city. A series of front or back yards that are, to date, just decorative but in the future will be transformed into food gardens. For me, it’s just a vision but in Oakland California it already exists.
Welcome back to First, We Eat. My weekly newsletter about the intersection of food, farming and cultural change. This week, I wanted to write a bit more about a commons, but one that isn’t just theoretical. ‘Cause all this chat about burning out while homesteading and pulling down fences is great — at least we’re acknowledging we can’t do it all and the current system isn’t working all that well — but what next?
I’m a stickler for having a plan
While in California recently (making First Eat), I visited Rammay. It is, simply, a backyard garden in a West Oakland neighbourhood that is planted out with fruit trees, vegetable beds, and medicinal plants. Later the same day, I went up into the Oakland Hills to Rinihmu Pulte'irekne (Sequoia Point) – a City of Oakland-owned parkland with towering sequoia trees that overlooks the San Francisco Bay. The two plots of land are vastly different but connected because both are part of Sogorea Te' Land Trust. As the name suggests, Sogorea Te' is a legal trust but one with a distinct purpose. It exists to manage lands that have been gifted, granted, leased and “given back” to the Lisjan Ohlone people of the Bay Area. Elsewhere in the city is an expansive market garden, and every plot is bound by a common objective: to bring balance back to the land.
A few weeks after visiting Rammay, Nakkiah Lui (the host and co-producer of First Eat) and I spoke with Corrina Gould, the Chair for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan nation. For decades, Gould has been organising protests and advocating to have sacred cultural sites returned, or at the very least acknowledged and protected.
You can listen to an interview with Corrina in episode six of First Eat.
And there’s a lot of literature about the landback movement, to help contextualise the monumental obstacles that confront leaders like Corrina and her co-founder of the Sogorea Te' Land Trust Johnella LaRose.
But today, I wanted to share some of Gould’s words on how and why they embraced the tools of the western legal system to further their aims. And I tried not to paraphrase too much, it’s important that her words guide this story.
Land trusts are a powerful tool
Let’s go back to 2011 for a minute. Gould, LaRose and other community organisers are occupying a 13 acre plot of land in Vallejo to prevent the City from developing the land and in the process destroying sacred shell mounds. After 109 days, they leave the land with two federally recognised tribes signing a document with the City that ensures the park will be protected. It is a win, but not without sacrifice. Soon after, Gould is invited to attend a Native land trust meeting, and her protest strategy changes.
“So I went because I didn't know what a land trust was,” Gould explains.
“And I'm sitting in a room for a couple of days with all of these guys that are with different tribes, and they're buying back their own land. And they're buying back their sacred sites. And they're leasing pieces of land, small pieces of land to tell their own cultural histories and stories. And I was like, maybe we can do this. This is a tool that we haven't had in our belt.”
The tool being a legal entity that can negotiate property rights.
“We have been going to planning meetings and protesting and organising and doing walks. But this is something, an actual legal tool we can use as a non federally recognised tribe to get land back into Indigenous hands.”
But as Gould sat in the meeting she realised the majority of the people in the room were men.
“So I met this guy named Dune Lankard, he’s a pretty famous guy in Alaska.” Lankard, a fisherman and member of the Eyak tribe of Alaska, is famous for an unfortunate reason. In 1989 the oil supertanker Exxon Valdez struck a reef off the coast of Alaska leaking 11 million gallons of oil into the ecologically sensitive Prince William Sound. Lankard fought to conserve the land adjoining the spill. Eventually, with a consortium of Native corporations representing different tribes, he succeeded in conserving 765,000 acres of land. So, the guys sitting in the room with Gould had experience using the legal system for tribal ends. And it got her thinking. She explains:
“We began to have this conversation about what does it look like when men are holding possession of the land, when they're in charge of the sacred sites? Not only with Native land, but when you look across the world?”
These questions led to yet more questions:
“What happened when men took over the land, when women no longer had power?”
“What happened in colonisation?”
Gould has answers to her own questions: “The first thing that colonisers do, they come to the land, and they strip you from your sacred, they take away the sacred places, and then they take away women's rights.”
For Gould, a land trust that centred Lisjan women was a way to reconnect the sacredness of the land with the sacredness of women. And so, in 2015 Gould and LaRose established Sogorea Te' Land Trust.
It is, quite plainly, a legal entity that gives the founders opportunity to negotiate and enter into property agreements with private landowners, the City, state-owned entities, and the like. They currently have multiple sites around Oakland under Sogorea Te' management. One plot is leased, another has been granted as an easement in perpetuity. Each plot has different underlying property rights but the entire process is one of rematriation: a return of the land to women.
Through rematriation, the Lisjan women aren’t constantly seeking permission to occupy land, manage it, and care for it.
As I explored last week, men are central to the history of private land ownership. After learning some of Gould’s story I wonder if our food producing lands would look different, and provide for us differently, if women had been centred in the establishment of the food system? Or perhaps the question should be even broader: would our lives be vastly different if more women were at the proverbial decision making table?
A few months ago, Nakkiah and I interviewed film producer and director Chelsea Winstanley for First Eat.
We wanted to know more about how she navigates Hollywood while keeping her value system intact. But in the end we talked a lot about C suite and boardroom spaces — you know, where decisions are made, contracts are signed, and institutions are protected. Winstanley is adamant that we need more women in these spaces, because: “we make really good fucking decisions, because we already know how to take care of community. And we already know that by being mothers or being aunties and sisters. We just are biologically wired that way, we are community driven for the benefit of all.”
Winstanley, who has Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāi Te Rangi ancestry, talks of making decisions that “benefit all”, a complete inversion of the Taylor Sheridan mode of operating that I wrote about last week. It’s a statement that also echoes Gould’s ambitions.
For Gould, the rematriation project is about bringing balance back to the land. It starts by reconnecting her people to the land and the waterways. But, also: “When the time is right we’ll invite allies and accomplices to do the same thing. Because as long as they're living on our lands, it is their responsibility to live in reciprocity with us as well, and the land and the waterways that feed and take care of their families. And so rematriation is all of that. It's about the balance of everything.”
I eagerly await such an invitation. And in the meanwhile, I’ll keep dreaming of that commons of connected front-yard food gardens. Perhaps the first step is a land trust that opens up food-producing land for the benefit of many, not just a few… what do you think?
If you want to find out more about rematriation projects, have a look at the extensive resources on the Sogorea Te' website and consider donating or paying the Shummi land tax to support their work.
If you’re in New Zealand, I can recommend supporting Papawhakaritorito Charitable Trust’s work.
In New South Wales, I’ve been following the Black Cede enterprise that’s in development with Waminda and the Kareela Ngura Native food project. If you’re able to support the enterprise, they are fundraising at the moment.
Next week in First, We Eat, I plan to dive into the topic of maternal diets. I shared a post on Instagram recently about not eating red meat at the moment on advice from my GP. A farmer friend DM’d to say she loves how I can separate my health and food from my vocation – which is cattle farmer in this context. That got me thinking about a meal I ate while I was in Oakland, California. A bowl of pumpkin seed mole. Rich in iron, it is a dish, I was told by the chef who prepared it, that’s ideal for pregnant women and nursing mothers. More on that next week.
And in the weekend edition for paid subscribers, I’m going to return to the topic of ostracisation… it struck a note with some of you so I want to dive in deeper.
Please keep sharing this newsletter with friends. It’s exciting to see the subscriber number grow each week!
Looking forward to seeing and doing more in this space. It is always amazing to see what a group of determined women can do!